Adobe has once again added a new wrinkle and a new expiration date for a special offering of their “Photoshop Photography Program.” The 12/31/13 date and $9.99 per month price for those Photoshop CS3 or newer owners still is in affect. BUT, what Adobe is now offering until 12/2/13 is the ability for anyone, whether they own Photoshop or not, or have a version older than CS3 to pay the same $9.99 per month (for a 12 month subscription) for Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, access to Behance ProSite and 20gb of cloud storage and file sharing.
I’ve had a number of questions in the last 24 hours about Adobe’s motivation for yet another change in their offering to photographers. Is it that Adobe is disappointed in their subscriptions? Probably not. Is this a way to lock-in those hundreds of thousands (or more likely, millions) of Photoshop users who never owned a legitimate copy? Possibly. Is it Adobe trying to do something positive after the credit card data theft disaster? You never know. Or is it that the holiday season is upon us and Adobe is trying to do something nice for photographers who have recently been frustrated by Adobe. You decide!
What’s my take on this latest time-limited offer? If you can get past the whole “subscription” issue and not having a “boxed” program, it’s a pretty good deal. There are definitely challenges if you stop your subscription, which will be the topic of another post. But this special offer definitely addresses Photoshop Elements users and all those running pirated versions of Photoshop and gives them a reasonable and relatively economical path to gain access to Photoshop CC and Lightroom, albeit for only the next 10 days.
Thom Hogan, highly regarded for his knowledge of Nikon and mirrorless cameras and his perspective on the photographic industry, has a comprehensive posting on the topic of Adobe’s “special” pricing offer. Rather than repeat much of what Thom wrote, it’s just easier to give him credit and provide the link to his posting, which is “HERE”.
The December issue of Photoshop User, p20, states, “…should you decide to stop your subscription to Creative Cloud, all CS6 and earlier versions of your program remain fully functional …” That may be true because your older version of Photoshop remains intact on your computer; note, however, the subscription includes LR 5 and the first thing LR 5 does when you crank it up is to upgrade your catalog. I don’t know if LR 4 can read the new LR 5 format, which might mean that you will lose all your post-LR4 images and edits. Does anyone know if the new catalog format is backward compatible? It seems unlikely, but I don’t know.
Alan, thanks for your clarification on edits, that was very helpful; however, let’s say you continue with Adobe’s CC program for a couple of years and then decide you’re tired and want to get off the technology treadmill and stay where you are. You would rollback to PS CS6 and lose all the enhancements; not the end of the world from my perspective. But I’m not sure what your LR status would be. If Adobe also forces you to rollback to LR 4 then you’ve got a mess on your hands … you would lose all your Imported images for the past couple of years. I suppose you could re-Import them, but I’m not sure the XMPs would sync up with the newly added catalog images. In either case, the solution doesn’t sound clean.